It's practically impossible for regular people to buy Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://levels.io/regular-people-bitcoin/ <comment><USER2> This is why I was unable to buy bitcoins when I first read about them on HN in 2010 and similar in 2011 when the price had gone over $1 and actually showed promise. (I have some emails to colleagues / friends showing my frustration at the time of wanting to get some)

I always wanted just 1 (still do), but back in 2010 I was just going to spend £100 and see what happens. It seems in the US the people who did similar to what I wanted to do in varying forms made good profits (and had an interesting ride).

This is different from 'speculating' (e.g. 'oh I wish I had actually bought some') - I had full intent and wanted to buy them, but just the barrier to entry due to UK regulations were very high. I even tried to arrange peer to peer transactions through reddit or in person but they also seemed difficult. Most people I ever met in person who had any didn't want to sell due to the belief of the ever increasing price.

<comment><USER3> I had luck buying bitcoins a few times about a year ago through MtGox. Their method of getting money in (UK bank transfer) was shut down about October last year, and since then I've not figured out how to buy more. I have to wonder where the money stoking these recent price rises is coming from.

Of course I managed to be highly ineffective at making the most of the bitcoins I had. I think I probably had about 10 bitcoins in my posession at one point, and I probably realised about £150 of real gain out of them. Hindsight is wonderful!

Edit: I should add that I opened my MtGox account a few years ago, before there was any requirement for ID or verification. I think the whole process has become a lot harder since.

<comment><USER2> It's coming from China[1]. A LOT OF MONEY from China. Like $millions. That's how all these early adopters in the USA are being able to cash out millions and the price is not crashing.

They seem to like the fact it separates them from the US dollar, as well as allowing Chinese residents more control over their money and a potential store of wealth comparable to gold (although far more volatile).

Of course I still believe this is unsustainable, but in a strange form this is a wealth rebalancing act on a global scale... the rich Chinese giving money to the US citizens.

As long as the rest of the world doesn't go bitcoin mad and let the Chinese cash out again, then if it ever pops there will be a lot of wealth lost in China.

[1][http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-27/bitcoin-surges- to-1...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-27/bitcoin-surges-to-1-000-as- virtual-money-gains-wider-acceptance.html)

<comment><USER4> I'm more worried what the effect of the Chinese government potentially outlawing BitCoin would have.

Both China and the US government have given BitCoin a tacit (and not-so-tacit) endorsement, China with a pro-BitCoin documentary on state television, and the US with Senate hearings that appeared to suggest the US is not going to move to outlaw it but rather regulate it. I do not see the US government giving its citizens the impression that using BitCoin would be legitimate and then going back on that suggestion - there would be too many vested interests, with a lot to lose, and they would not be cool with that.

The Chinese government is more powerful than the US government, however. There is a chance that they could see their citizens pour their savings into BitCoin and still move for a regulatory crackdown. I'm still concerned that they will believe BitCoin is getting out of control and their ability to control the funds exiting and entering the country through BitCoin is diminished.

The bottom line: the more countries that start using BitCoin, that more stable it will become, the less a single country's regulatory action will impact the price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is not practically impossible to buy bitcoins. It may take a little effort that is all and even then it is minimal effort if you spend any time at a computer.

Localbitcoins.com – You can buy bitcoins from other individuals either in person or using bank transfer. There is an escrow system in place for protection of buyer and seller. Using bank transfer you dont even need to leave your house, you can do it via online banking.

BTC-e.com – This exchange does not require verification to deposit money or trade but you may need to provide verification before you withdraw. I sent pictures of my photo driving licence and a photo of a utility bill and was verified within 48 hours.

Bitstamp – you need to be be verified before you can deposit money. Follow the rules they lay down re: high quality scan and photo and you will be fine.

MtGox – Same as above, follow the rules and it is fine. Verification did at one time (April bubble) take a few weeks, it is much more reasonable now.

These are 3 of the exchanges but there are others such as Kraken, Coinbase etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> So I tried Bitstamp 3 times and was denied all the times. I'm not a noob in this respect, I know what a good scan is and I've used this passport scan (front+back) for many other services. They're just not good at verifying docs there.

<comment><USER6> Not to mention that the requirement sending hi quality scans of your passport and other personal details to small, obscure websites, like Bitstamp and MtGox, is BS in the first place.

<comment><USER7> I think that's the result of anti-money laundering laws and know your customer regulations.

<comment><USER6> The "send your password scan" perhaps, the "to some obscure web services" though is not.

<comment><USER5> they are not obscure if you know anything regarding bitcoin, they are the main exchanges.

To people with no knowldge of the internet amazon may be an obscure site but you send them yur credit card details

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here are options the author, and people in general, fail to consider:

1\. Sell a good/service on craigslist and require payment in bitcoins. You _will_ find a buyer in a big city. If necessary, even buy an item typically in high demand by bitcoin owners (eg. computer gear) specifically for the purpose of reselling it!

2\. Or buy coins directly from people, see [https://localbitcoins.com](https://localbitcoins.com)

<comment><USER9> This is kinda true but at lease on your first point still not for regular people. My brother wants to buy some and If I told him, "yeah just go get a pile of asics and sell them on craigslist" I'm sure that would be just as difficult for him. Then he needs to keep a wallet, regular backups and a marginal level of network security.

<comment><USER8> By computer gear I mean a mouse, monitor, hard drive, etc. Not ASICs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't agree. The first time I acquired bitcoins it was through this website: [https://localbitcoins.com](https://localbitcoins.com) I signed up, posted a request for a meeting and two hours later I met a guy at a main station of a European capital where I got my bitcoins. Few days later I signed up for MtGox. Again, the verification process took around 24 hours and from that point I was able to buy and sell bitcoins using my regular bank account.

<comment><USER11> Same here...localbitcoins was very easy.

<comment><USER12> Is this really practical for mainstream use though? If I want to buy a single bitcoin, I need to meet a stranger and bring $1,000 in cash? If this is the recommended method of acquiring bitcoins, it deserves to fail.

<comment><USER13> You don't need to buy a whole bitcoin. These aren't shares in a company. You can bring $50 and buy a fraction of a bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Serious question: What's to prevent me, as a US citizen, to buy bitcoins on Coinbase, then setup an online store where I sell bitcoins at a 10-20% markup, payable by credit card?

1\. I realize I'd be taking a risk with chargbacks. Any way to minimize this? Perhaps hold onto the bitcoin for a period of time?

Seems like the demand from ordinary people is so high, they wouldn't mind paying $100 - $200 per bitcoin if they can pay with a credit card.

<comment><USER15> Even if you weren't bankrupted by chargebacks, which you definitely would be, the credit card companies would shut down your account. They don't want people buying bitcoins; it's a threat to them.

<comment><USER16> It's simpler and less conspiratorial than that. It's the same reason you can't buy a money order or cashier's check with a credit card. You're not selling a product, you're creating a situation where your customer can get a cash advance on a line of credit that you did not approve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have been trying to buy Bitcoins for a few years, it's way too hard. When I was in high school learning programming I wanted to buy them because I heard you could trade with Python scripts. They were $0.30 at the time and I tried to put in ~$50 (if only!). Today I still want to put in $50 - $100 but I can't because as a college student I don't have proof of residence. I have a passport and bank account but I still can't get on Mt. Gox. Sure I can get on Coinbase and buy, but why would I buy something I can't register to sell?

<comment><USER18> What are you talking about? You can buy AND sell in coinbase.

<comment><USER19> If you're in the US and if you don't get denied as a high risk transaction and then maybe a few weeks later you might see some money.

The story of Bitcoin is practically no-one seems able to cash out at the reported rates - you're lucky to get about 1/3rd of that.

<comment><USER20> Its the "exchanges" and "trade platforms" of BTC that are the driving force of the scam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Try CoinJar in Australia, very good company for buying and selling Bitcoin.

Remember do not use their wallet service for holding large amounts of Bitcoin, even the owner of the business recommends keeping most of your coin in a cold wallet.

<comment><USER22> Hmm, from some posts on the bitcointalk forums it seems to be run by a previous scammer. Some people have had luck using it though, so ymmv I guess.

Edit: yup, see all the links here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1gb0d4/coinjar_fill...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1gb0d4/coinjar_filler_the_cheapest_way_to_buy_bitcoins/camlhmz)

<comment><USER21> I use it for transfer only and never store Bitcoins on their server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> When the primary way of trading bitcoin is through unregulated exchanges based in Slovenia and Bulgaria the bigger concern should be your ability to get your money out in the future.

</comment><comment><USER24> For those in Vancouver, we (Coinwaves) just opened a physical Bitcoin exchange in Gastown to address this problem. It seems online exchanges are still dealing with how to balance fraud-protection and customer convenience. We thought that, for now, an in-person approach made a lot of sense.

We're focusing not only about helping people purchase Bitcoins easily, but also educating them on the technology and methods of safely storing and using Bitcoin. We're also keen to impart the notion that Bitcoin is more than a mere speculative instrument, but a potentially world-changing technology.

Any Bitcoin enthusiasts in town, whether or not you're looking to buy, give us a shout!

Link: [http://www.coinwaves.com/](http://www.coinwaves.com/)

</comment><comment><USER25> It was too much of hassle to buy back when I first heard about it. They were $3 at the time. I didn't really believe it would take off but if it were easy to buy I would have definitely bought $50 worth "just in case".

</comment><comment><USER26> Hello. I'm happy to sell bitcoins to anyone who is within the UK. If you're near Brighton we can trade face-to-face for cash. Otherwise just email we and we can do a bank transfer. My email is email@example.com . I have a large number of reviews which I can provide. Personally I normally buy my own from an IRC channel on Freenode called bitcoin-otc-uk. Feel free to ask me any questions. It's not too tricky to trade but can be a bit difficult to get into.

<comment><USER27> I too am in Brighton,! Don't have any cash at the moment, but I'm definitely interested in Bitcoin as a thing once I have some surplus money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is mostly because people confuse a trading-floor with an exchange. When you travel to, say, Thailand for a holiday, you don't walk into Wallstreet to trade some Dollars for Baht. Instead, you exchange some at an airport of office around the corner. MtGox (and the likes) are like that wall-street. Whereas there are a lot of smaller places to actually buy some BTC, alike that office at the airport.

Yes. When you exchange Dollars for Baht, you will pay a lot more then the average rate that goes on Wallstreet at that moment. And yes, you cannot trade millions of Dollars for Bazillion of Baht. In .nl, for example, there are places where you can buy with a Dutch bank account. Works fine if you want to trade a few tens of Euros.

Stop pointing people to full-blown trading-platforms when all they want is a few BTC. Instead, point them to alternatives, including your personal wallet on your android :).

I, usually, explain people that they can have a few millibit, but not for Euro: the'yll have to sell me something: a bottle of wine, crate of beer, stuff that I would buy anyway. So that I can say that I bought beer with Bitcoin, and to show others that there is actually stuff you can buy for it, rather then purely some get-rich-quick-stockmarket.

</comment><comment><USER29> Keep in mind that there are no legally compliant Bitcoin exchanges that support deposits or withdrawals in the United States. This means that their (and your) assets could be frozen by regulators at any point in time with no prior notice.

</comment><comment><USER30> Not really, just use [http://virwox.com/](http://virwox.com/) and you can Bitcoins through credit card or paypal instantly.

There is a daily account limit though of $110 for new accounts, after 10 days of $150 etc.

<comment><USER31> I've just tried VirWox and unfortunately I was not able to buy bitcoins there since there is a minimum of bitcoins that I need to buy (this was not informed in their FAQ). So I'm requesting that they refund my paypal payment. Let's see what will happen..

<comment><USER31> EDIT: Fortunately VirWox was nice to refund the Paypal payment that I made since the amount that I deposited there was not enough to buy Bitcoins with it.

<comment><USER30> Why didn't you wait another day, deposit the same amount and then buy the minimum amount, I think it's 0.1 BTC, is it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Although I agree with many things that the author says, I wouldn't say practically impossible.

I, myself, have bought bitcoins and set up wallets for two friends and a family member, regular people as the author would say. After seriously warning them, and letting them know that chances are that they will lose all their investment, they transferred me the money and I gave them the instructions for the wallet.

However, I believe that the more the bitcoin economy grows the easier will be for people to acquire them. I also hope that people will start spending them, instead of just keeping them as an investment.

</comment><comment><USER33> I never had any of these problems, nor does anyone I know have them. My and everyone's applications at Mt.Gox and Bitstamp and elsewhere have always been accepted, as far as I know. And there are of course alternatives like Localbitcoins or in the Netherlands you can pay using iDeal (e.g. at bitonic.nl) which is _extremely_ easy. A 5 minute deal the first time around. I also never encountered any trouble buying Bitcoin simply for being European. So far I actually thought the people in the US would be having a harder time with the MtGox trouble.

</comment><comment><USER34> Just got to [https://localbitcoins.com/](https://localbitcoins.com/) and buy some online by bank transfer, it takes about 15 minutes. It's not rocket science.

<comment><USER35> Good luck with that if there are no-one in your "local" selling coins, just buying. That's my case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Same experience here. I wanted to grab some Litecoin last week as people started speculating with them as well but I won't totally give up my privacy to shady websites for some gambling.

<comment><USER37> The only practical way to buy litecoins right now is buying bitcoins first, then buying litecoins with bitcoins.

<comment><USER38> You can also buy LTC on BTCe by using something like MoneyGram - walk in to a CVS/Duane Reade with cash and you will have LTC right away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> For exactly this reason we have founded [https://bit4coin.net](https://bit4coin.net) in Amsterdam - an easy-to-use bitcoin gift voucher service. Customers can buy vouchers online (later also in retail shops), and we ship them to their doors. They can then redeem them for bitcoins.

We felt we had to make bitcoin more tangible for new users and put it in a form they are already familiar with and attribute value to: gift cards.

Would love to get some feedback from you guys!

</comment><comment><USER40> Considering how the price is doing even though it is really hard to buy the things, I shudder to think what would happen if you could buy them at your local bank branch.

<comment><USER41> I've paid for BTC with a bank deposit before. Unsure if any exchanges still offer this

<comment><USER37> Plenty of private sellers still do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Could I setup a small kiosk at a heavily populated area and sell bitcoins for cash and/or money orders? Any regulations in SF against something like this?

<comment><USER13> I think you could, and you should.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> At some point, Barclays Pingit (a UK mobile payment service) provided a service to buy Bitcoin by sending cash to services that supported it (you can send cash to a telephone number if it maps up to a bank account). However it was always down when I looked. The only alternative seemed to be wire transfers and escrow which I wasn't interested in dealing with.

</comment><comment><USER43> How about a Bitcoin ATM machine? [https://lamassu.is/](https://lamassu.is/)

</comment><comment><USER44> The very first sentence shows that the author does not know what he's talking about. Tulips manic is not an accurate comparison because the number of Bitcoins can't be increased except through mining which is a predetermined rate. Tulips can easily be increased by planting more.

<comment><USER45> > Tulips can easily be increased by planting more.

Please see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6763421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6763421)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I didn't have any trouble at all. Signed up on bitstamp.com, took two days to verify my account. Money which I sent to them (via bank transfer) was credited to my account the next day. All in all a pretty painless experience.

Edit: I live in Switzerland, Bitstamp based in UK or Slovenia.

</comment><comment><USER47> Coinbase makes it really simple. In a week, without ID verification I received my BTC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Coinbase is US-only though?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm yet to hear of anyone denying verification. I've had accounts at BTC-E, CampBX, Bitstamp, and Coinbase to name a few. Haven't had a single issue getting verified anywhere and most took less than a week.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is actually a good analogy to doing a startup.

Many people _want_ to buy bitcoins, but only the ones that are really commited to doing so succeed.

It's very easy to say you wanted to buy Bitcoin, but did you really try that hard?

</comment><comment><USER50> I was to buy my first bitcoin. Then the bank tell me is absolute forbidden to make bank transfer to any thing that look alike a forex stuff. Or get money for them. Criminal, you are...

Here, in Colombia, all banks do the same.

</comment><comment><USER51> Coinbase?

[https://coinbase.com/?r=508ae579ead0660200000066&utm_campaig...](https://coinbase.com/?r=508ae579ead0660200000066&utm_campaign=user- referral&src=referral-link)

</comment><comment><USER52> Easiest way I've found in the UK is buying Magic: the Gathering Online tickets via PayPal and trading them for Bitcoin. I dunno if this is the way the future was supposed to be, but it works for me.

</comment><comment><USER53> this guy is not doing something right, or the fact he lives in 10 different places around the world is a factor. I had no trouble at all, beyond waiting a few days for MtGox to verify me (when they were swamped at the time), and Bitstamp was a day's wait after I fixed the PNG they wanted (not enough dpi for their automated document scanner). That was just a week or two ago.

so to me, all his reasons are specious ones. Maybe I'm just old enough to know how to deal with all the paperwork the Man / the Matrix wants.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a Dutch citizen with a Dutch bank account (with online banking) who can do European transfers with ease. It doesn't matter where I live, as far as this concerned I'm the same as any Dutch/European citizen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Its even worse outside the US. Most places require a (US) bank transfer. That just isn't feasible for me...I need at least a SWIFT code and would still get hit with heavy fees.

</comment><comment><USER55> Should be retitled "It's practically impossible for people in my country to buy Bitcoin" as the generalization defeats the point of the article as at least for 300 million people (some of whom are "regular"), the process of buying bitcoin is no more difficult than the process of signing up for a PayPal account.

If you are not one of these countries then contacting your representative/member of parliament and asking them to campaign the legislation changed is generally a much better way of getting the situation resolved than writing whiny articles on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER56> [http://bitmymoney.com](http://bitmymoney.com) is an easy way to get bitcoins in the Netherlands (and possibly Europe)

</comment><comment><USER18> That's what coinbase is for. Pretty easy to register and get verified... if you happen to be in the US of A (or own a bank account there, anyway).

</comment><comment><USER57> ?!

In the US, Coinbase is easy In the UK, Bittylicious is easy

I'm sorry it's so hard in Germany, but your title should be "It's hard to buy Bitcoins in Germany"

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not from Germany, but Netherlands. But your point stands if you're talking about everywhere outside UK/US.

<comment> guard-of-terra From Russia (and Ukraine perhaps) it's like very straightforward too. You just set up a btc-e.com account and send in cash via Qiwi.

There are a lot of local services mentioned in the comments, so it seems. If there aren't in Netherlands why don't you create one?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> People in the EU should really try bitcoin.de. This is a reputation based marketplace. First level of verification is not hard, taking 2 days.

</comment><comment><USER59> Why are prices for bitcoins so drastically different on the different exchanges? Shouldn't arbitrage fix this nearly right away.

</comment><comment><USER60> For Canadians, there is Cavirtex. I had no problem becoming verified with them, and it was as simple as becoming say PayPal verified.

</comment><comment><USER41> "But verification can take weeks or months and the odds of getting accepted are actually low"

This is simply not the case, at least in the US

</comment><comment><USER61> This is only really true in America. I've bought bitcoins two different ways in Australia. It wasn't that hard.

</comment><comment><USER62> OP seems to fail to grasp the fact that bitcoin is not issued by some bank, but rather individuals in the network.

So to avoid the pitfall of "going to the bank to buy foreign currency" would be buying bitcoin from the individuals. There's #OTC and LocalBitcoins.com and the like that put individuals together to figure out best means of transfer. It carries risks, or course, but what doesn't?

<comment><USER63> There are certainly degrees of risk. Like buying something from craigslist for cash is riskier than buying the same thing from a retailer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> If there was ever a time for Coinbase to go global, this is their moment to take over.

</comment><comment><USER23> Anyway have information about withdrawal delays on the different exchanges?

</comment><comment><USER65> Does coinbase work in the UK? I thought it was US only.

</comment><comment><USER66> what about [https://safello.com/](https://safello.com/) ? worked perfect for me - at least here in sweden.

</comment><comment><USER67> localbitcoins.com

</comment><comment><USER20> Even these comments here are full of obstacles. Its like techies are so into btc they cant comprehend an article stating a real problem witb bitcoin. Its supposed to be easy but it isnt, all these btc exchanges/markers/sites are worse than normal banking/trade sites.

No I havent handed my photo to my bank and I wont do so for all the shady btc sites mentioned here. I dont hand my ID or "get verified" to amazon when buying stuff or other currencies either.

Bitcoin is the worlds biggest scam.

EDIT: Aside from the verification many of the exchanges actually dont deliver BTC to your own wallet but provide the kind "service" of keeping "your" wallet at their servers.

<comment><USER68> I was with you until the final sentence, which makes you sound emotionally involved rather than putting forward a logical argument.

That aside, let me retort;

> Its supposed to be easy but it isnt

I agree, and I'll be hugely surprised if some enterprising individual doesn't solve the friction soon.

> No I havent handed my photo to my bank and I wont do so for all the shady > btc sites mentioned here. I dont hand my ID or "get verified" to amazon when > buying stuff or other currencies either.

I agree. I used bitbargain which was essentially as easy - and documentation free - as using my internet banking to transfer some funds to some bloke's bank account, who then released coin to me. It made me nervous doing it (what other system asks you to log in to your internet banking and xfer funds to some guy's account, simply trusting that they will deliver?) but it's about as easy as it gets currently.

It's a new frontier, it's bound to be rough around the edges. And make no mistake, buying BTC is the edge. Once you've passed that hurdle, the simplicity is beautiful.

<comment><USER9> So is the easy way to do it an escrow service that can protect you from getting jacked using the same method?

<comment><USER68> I'm not sure escrow services exist (yet). I don't know how exchanges work, having only bought on bitbargain, and never sold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> A few months ago, I decided to buy some bitcoin. I did a little research, ended up on coinbase, and linked my bank account and my phone number, and a few days later, I owned a few bitcoin. It was a pretty straightforward process, and as far as I know, they're the _only_ straightforward way to buy bitcoin.

I predict that in a few years, Coinbase will be a billion dollar concern as long as they keep doing a good job and their system isn't compromised. Keep it up!

</comment><comment><USER70> I would like to point everyone's attention to the fact that the difficulty of buying bitcoins has to do with the current banking system and regulations, not with Bitcoin itself. If you could buy bitcoins by swiping your card, its price would currently be more like $100k, not $1k. Accepting Bitcoin and trading in Bitcoin are the easiest things in the world.

<comment><USER71> Accepting Bitcoin isn't quite that easy, if your customers are expecting instant real-time online fulfillment. Bitcoin 'merchant accounts' are showing up to make things easier than they were years ago, but there's still some code integration required on a website's backend to make it all happen.</comment></comment>


How do u explain this to elliot roger? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/heightismwatch <comment><AUTHOR> people need to know about this, our society if un meritocratic.</comment>


RWW Most Promising Company of 2011: Simplegeo - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/most_promising_company_for_2011_simplegeo.php

<comment><USER2> They chose Tumblr as the "Best Little Company" for 2010, and their track record for this award is pretty good:

2009: Aardvark

2008: Zoho

2007: Twitter

2006: YouTube

2005: 37signals

2004: Flickr(Ludicorp)

Look at these "little companies" from just a few years ago. I love the new speed of business.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _The original plan of CrashCorp was to create mobile games using augmented > reality, but the young company soon learned that the hardest part was > developing the back-end geolocation infrastructure that would support their > applications._

Geolocation technology is around for decades, with widely supported standards and a number of open-source servers available. Augmented Reality in the other hand sounds very challenging, due to image manipulation and dealing with an environment with limited resources (mobiles).

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER4> It's not you missing something, it's RWW. We were actually trying to build "Alternate Reality" games, not "Augmented Reality". The clear distinction is that our plan was to build "game worlds on top of the real world" but didn't worry about our implementation. It could have been some list-based game, and it still would have been Alternate Reality.

However, we were looking into using Augmented Reality as the delivery mechanism for these games. Then we open sourced the AR stuff that we had built to that date: <https://github.com/simplegeo/SGAREnvironment>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know some of the SimpleGeo folk, and they are highly intelligent, awesome people.

</comment><comment><USER6> w00t. (i'm an investor)

<comment><USER4> And we love that about you :)</comment></comment>


Mexico's sugar tax leads to fall in consumption for second year running - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/22/mexico-sugar-tax-lower-consumption-second-year-running <comment><USER2> If the money goes to support the associated health costs then it's still win- win.</comment>


Video reveals lung damage in US coronavirus patient - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/26/health/covid-19-lung-damage-video/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> _A video shows the lungs of a man who had been asymptomatic a few days earlier...

"This is not a 70, 80-year-old immunosuppressed, diabetic patient," Mortman said. "Other than high blood pressure, he has no other significant medical issues."

... it is clear that the damage isn't localized to a single area, but instead covers massive swaths of both lungs, showing how rapidly and aggressively the infection can take hold, even in younger patients ..._</comment>


Show HN: Python library to automate your time management in Airtable and others - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/grandrew/taskjuggler-python <comment><USER2> Sounds cool!</comment>


The Discovery of Radium by Marie Curie - <AUTHOR> https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61622 <comment><USER2> The time this was discovered was an incredible time of discovery, largely due to the new availability of high vacuum pumps and high voltage in glass. People were messing with these cathode ray tubes all over, and they led to so much.

Roentgen found x-rays in 1895 in a high vacuum, high voltage glass tube. This led to the discovery of the electron and quantum physics at the time (and later, the double helical nature of DNA was found from xray diffraction). Following that work, Becquerel discovered natural radiation. Curie and Rutherford followed that up with nuclear physics, which eventually led to atomic warfare, radiation therapy, mars rover power supplies, and nuclear power stations.

Meanwhile, CRTs also gave way to vacuum tube electronics like radios, amplified music, and large-scale telephone networks.

And of course the TV.

Man I love cathode ray tubes. Wrote a thing about them once:

[https://partofthething.com/thoughts/the-modern-era-passed- th...](https://partofthething.com/thoughts/the-modern-era-passed-through-a- cathode-ray-tube/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sidenote: first person to win the Nobel twice; only person to win in two different scientific fields.

Extraordinary achievement - especially considering how difficult things must have been for female scientists back then.

</comment><comment><USER4> *Maria Skłodowska-Curie.

Also the link is inaccessible in Germany.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently blocked due to a German court case in 2018 [1]. Did a notice like the one in the article appear when you accessed the website?

[1] [https://www.ghacks.net/2018/03/04/project-gutenberg- blocks-a...](https://www.ghacks.net/2018/03/04/project-gutenberg-blocks- access-from-germany/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Then I thought that there should be in the minerals some unknown element > having a much greater radioactivity than uranium or thorium. And I wanted to > find and to separate that element, and I settled to that work with Professor > Curie. We thought it would be done in several weeks or months, but it was > not so. It took many years of hard work to finish that task.

Sounds like every software project I've worked on!

Edit: I love also the .txt formatting, wish more books had this option [https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61622/61622-0.txt](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61622/61622-0.txt)

</comment><comment><USER6> ...just about a century ago, and only about 25 years later, the atomic bomb was realized. It makes you wonder what 2045 will bring as you look around at quantum computing and biotechnology.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not too long ago, I read that one can see her notebooks yourself! You can sign up and be on a list to do so! If you visit Paris... And sign a waiver... And wear some protective clothing...

Because her notebooks are still radioactive and will be for quite some time to come.

[https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/02/27/marie- curie/](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/02/27/marie-curie/)

(I still chuckle - nervously - whenever I am reminded about this fact!)

</comment><comment><USER8> Here is the link to the Nobel prize: [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1903/summary/](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1903/summary/)

The distribution of the prize is interesting: \- 1/2 went to Becquerel (who's that?) \- 1/4 went to Pierre Curie \- 1/4 went to Marie Curie

<comment><USER9> He was actually the person that discovered radioactivity. He did so when studying phosphorescence, and discovered that uranium salts (that are phosphorescent too), also exposed a photographic plate even when they not had been exposed to light, and even through black paper. You can clearly argue about the share of the price, and he was also clearly doing the discovery by luck.

The Curies, and especially Marie Curie was the ones that sorted out the nature of radioactivity and discovered two new elements in the process, but the discovery of radioactivity itself was quite important, so that he received the Nobel prize was not really undeserved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Right there in the text: Author: Marie Sklodowska Curie

So why the are you people still changing her name to just Curie?

<comment><USER11> Us people are doing that to her name because us people generally use first and last name when referring to individuals and ignore the middle name.

For example:

Melanie Trump

Elizabeth Warren

Steve Jobs

Bill Gates

...

<comment><USER12> That's not her middle name. It's her maiden name.</comment></comment></comment>


Can Git Solve Blockchain Scalability? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sourcerer.io/can-git-solve-blockchain-scalability-c21cdc79dace <comment><USER2> This (maybe) addresses the technical side of the problem while ignoring the economic side of the problem: you can't have a discussion about changing the blockchain without discussing block rewards and transaction fees.

Does each branch of the tree get the entire block reward? If so, then you've going to have an explosion of branches.

If not, and each mined block earns, say 1/Nth of the reward for N branches, then you most likely go back to a single chain of single-block merges, because each miner is going to try to force N back toward 1.

You also need to address the incentives around mining the merge block. If these incentives are not drawn from transaction fees, then you are forced into an inflationary currency.

</comment><comment> coyote-2000 I wrote the original post.

It's an excellent comment, thank you. I didn't think through the economic consequences. My first reaction is there need to be some betting in place. For example, there could be a fixed cost for a miner to issue a block, and at the same time there could be a variable reward for the same block that is tied to 'good' behavior (not too much branching and not too little) that gets known only when a merge block is issued.

Inflationary vs transaction fees: makes sense, thank you.</comment>


Visualising sound: Laser and mirror and sound - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-V1uXeyGmg <comment><USER2> Very cool! Reminds me of Jerobeam Fenderson using the XY mode in ossiloscopes to draw images with stereo sounds: [https://youtu.be/rtR63-ecUNo](https://youtu.be/rtR63-ecUNo)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Tried not to alter the title too much, but it seems like HN transforms "+" into "and", which is why it looks a little confusing</comment>


What Would You Say to a Principal Who Shows Your Kid a $1,639.88 Laptop? - <AUTHOR> http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=81795427 <comment><USER2> Fees at this school are $30,000 a year. The cost of this laptop seems insignificant compared to that so I doubt most of the parents care.</comment>


YouTube will stop emailing subscribers about new videos next week - <AUTHOR> https://9to5google.com/2020/08/07/youtube-new-video-emails/ <comment><AUTHOR> I can't imagine this happening. Emails are the only reliable way to receive notifications about new content coming out, and my main way of interacting with Youtube at all.

<comment><USER2> It has happened. :(

I thought I had messed up a 'do not notify' setting. But it was just poor timing on my part.

Likewise, e-mail is my 'to-do' (or to-watch) queue. I mean, I have a day-job, and notifications on android are rather ephemeral and disorganized. One wrong swipe and everything is gone. I haven't tried those on desktop, I only get them when on YouTube, still doesn't feel useful.</comment></comment>


Simultaneous Shortage and Oversupply (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.jefftk.com/p/simultaneous-shortage-and-oversupply <comment><USER2> Having had applied to and even interviewed at some of the companies/jobs listed in the blog post, I will provide an alternative explanation:

These roles are just like many others in the field, companies are supposedly desperate to fill them, but set unrealistically high expectations for the hiring bar so the role is never filled.

Context: 6 years professional experience, open to moving anywhere in US, experience at two SV unicorns, fine taking a reasonable pay cut to work on these things, still rejected or never heard back from every job of this type I've applied to/interviewed for.

<comment><USER3> As a similar but "dual" experience: I am a very desirable candidate in my specialty. My resume is really really good looking, to the point where jobs have commented that they were worried I was fake. I've never been turned down for an interview, and only turned down for a job or internship once.

Having been offered positions at a number of companies who "really need" someone with my skillset, a lot of these places are shockingly inflexible on pay. I make 3-4x what (I infer) they normally pay people in nominally similar positions, and they seem absolutely unable to match that for procedural reasons, even though based on their description that seems like a reasonable investment for a specialist they really really need. The companies I end up working for are typically outsize successful, and I attribute a lot of that to their willingness to fork over some extra cash when it makes rational sense, and shockingly few companies in SV fit this description.

<comment><USER4> There are reasons to be inflexible on pay. I imagine it works enough of the time, and a candidate will accept the lower pay. I hypothesize also that inflexible pay policies make it more difficult to be accused of discriminatory pay practices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem is that expectations and accepted norms in software engineering are out of reality.

A few factors involved here:

1- The 'Full Stack' Developer

You'll often see companies looking for 'full stack' developers, and in their mind they are expecting someone who is a master of both the backend and frontend.

But, that is, in fact, exceedingly rare. Most people will gravitate towards a part of development that they are most comfortable in. That's not to say that a developer _can 't_ be good at both, but the number of people who are _great_ at both is a small group indeed.

Node.js is a symptom of this problem IMO: Whatever you say about JS as a backend language, the drive to have web developers to not have to 'learn another language' to do backend work is fairly obvious.

So, rather than looking for a mix of team members that are good at either backend or frontend, they look for this godlike 'full stack' developer. What they often get instead is whomever is best at convincing them they can handle it all.

2 - RDD Driven development

Oftentimes, rather than picking the existing tools/paradigms that are right for the job, the tools _marketed_ as the solution to the problem are instead chosen. And of course, the expectations for those marketed tools wind up being out of whack (i.e. the recent job posting looking for 12 years of Kubernetes experience.)

3 - It's easier/better to get a better job somewhere else than an internal promotion

Many orgs make it difficult to advance, or advancement doesn't have the same gains as taking a similar role elsewhere. As a result, people often leave, and because of corporate/cultural norms (screw offboarding, we need to finish the sprint commitments!) knowledge loss is a result.

4 - The Second order effects of the above

Basically, the points above feed into a vicious cycle: The developers better at bullshitting (that also realize the above) will produce RDD driven projects and hop to the next space. But because they have spent most of their time studying 'persuasion' rather than good development practices, they leave a huge mess, which only makes the hiring manager's expectations that much more unreasonable.

</comment><comment><USER6> What is EA??? The answer is really simple: oversupply of mediocre talent, and shortage of top talent.

<comment><USER7> Agreed - this article would have been a lot better if the author defined what they meant by "EA movement".

It broke my reading flow to have to go and look the term up.

Effective altruism. I had no idea that was a thing.

Also, I don't see what's particularly altruistic about working at Deep Mind or OpenAI - they pay pretty well from what I know.

There probably _is_ a genuine shortage of programmers willing to work full time at a socially or environmentally oriented non-profit in the Bay Area.

<comment><USER8> > they pay pretty well from what I know

The core point of effective altruism is to maximize the positive impact you have on the world. That doesn't really have any correlation how much you're getting paid.

> There probably is a genuine shortage of programmers willing to work full > time at a socially or environmentally oriented non-profit in the Bay Area.

Would that be more impactful than working at high paying job and then donation that money somewhere? I doubt these non-profits are constrained by their lack of programmers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Leaving everything else aside, the author seems to ignore a glaring point that in part solves this apparent paradox: everything is a huge game of musical chairs.

Imagine that everyone he knows who want to change jobs go and filling those openings. Brilliant, now the other companies new to open new positions to fill those who left. In big companies, particularly in places like SV, the attrition rate is so high that they need to constantly hire just to keep their numbers even over time.

</comment><comment><USER10> People are less interested in doing the thing they said they're going to do than they are in saying they're going to do it. Examples:

\- "I'm going to start working out"

\- "I'm going to 'learn to code'"

\- "I'm going to follow through on that thing from Craigslist"

\- "I'm going to meet up for coffee"

\- "I'm going to change jobs"

\- "I'm going to find somebody to fill this job"

Aziz on flakes: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RbMv7HUiO4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RbMv7HUiO4)

<comment><USER11> A lot of the time, life intervenes. And a lot of the time, they say that just to shut their friends/family up about an issue.

Aziz talks about commitment-phobia, but on the other hand, one of the most frequently given personal growth advice I've seen in the last 20 years was: learn to say no. Stop trying to agree to every single thing someone proposes to you. I suppose they're flip sides of the same coin - say "yes" only when you mean it, and say "no" otherwise.

<comment><USER10> Not exactly relevant to this context, where the question is "[Why is there] simultaneous shortage and oversupply [of programmers for the EA movement?]".

People don't post job ads or tweet about wanting to work in EA because their friends and family are nagging them about it.

My answer to the question is that people have an idealized version of the person they'd like to be, and this differs from how much work they're actually willing to put in to follow through. This goes for both the people claiming to want to find work and the company (i.e. people) claiming that they're looking for someone to hire. In other words, there is a simultaneous shortage and oversupply because people are flakes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "So, why don't these openings get filled quickly? " What made him think that ? Not sure I agree with this premise. OpenAI, Deepmind, etc have no difficulty hiring.

</comment><comment><USER11> Isn't the standard answer that most programmers on the job market are bad, and those who are good are already employed and thus rarely on the job market?

<comment><USER13> The complementary scenario is also plausible - the employers that are decent have low attrition, write reasonable job ads, and fill positions quickly, so most of the ads (on a number x unit time basis) are from clueless employers with self-defeating criteria.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is EA?

"The EA movement has a ton of programmers ..."

<comment> awinter-py effective altruism

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What the hell is an EA?

</comment><comment><USER16> _> the good jobs are all in AI safety,_

Today's problems - like "AI" systems that replicate existing biases; decisions too opaque to check whether they're based on protected characteristics; and systems with higher error rates for some minority group - are about 75% politics/advocacy.

After all, no matter how good your solutions to those problems, you've got to persuade companies to adopt them voluntarily - or legislators to force them to.

Tough to find _that_ skill set.</comment>


Multi-provider VPN Client Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities - <AUTHOR> https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/09/vulnerability-spotlight-Multi-provider-VPN-Client-Privilege-Escalation.html <comment><USER2> Title changed from "RCE ProtonVPN and NordVPN VPN". This is not an RCE (remote code execution).</comment>


Show HN: A news aggregator for the Python community written in Python/Django - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sebst/pythonic-news/ <comment><AUTHOR> I built a news aggregator (a Hacker news lookalike) in Django. The aim is to power a community aggregator specific to the Python community at [https://news.python.sc](https://news.python.sc).

If you want to participate, claim your invite here: [https://forms.gle/TJSNLXD8fgyFYUaFA](https://forms.gle/TJSNLXD8fgyFYUaFA)

Of course, there is not much content here, so you're all welcome to contribute ;-)

<comment><USER2> I don't see how to reply to a comment. For example, if I go here[0] where there are two top-level comments, I don't see any reply links.

[0] [https://news.python.sc/item/73cc2374-210c-4b6a-aca1-bfb98623...](https://news.python.sc/item/73cc2374-210c-4b6a-aca1-bfb98623c97b)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. For now you'd need to click on the "0 comments" link next to the comment you'd like to reply to

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool. I built something similar once also. Did you look into using Django-MPTT for the nested comments and decide against it? [https://github.com/django- mptt/django-mptt](https://github.com/django-mptt/django-mptt) .

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I used that lib, too.

<comment><USER3> ah, cool -- on second look i now see it in requirements.txt

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very good job, I like it! I like it even better that you prepopulated the feed with very interesting articles for the hn launch. Can you share any tips about your deployment process? I can assume you didn't use docker as i don't see any Dockerfile in your repo. Did you use ci/cd and/or staging servers etc? I really like Django but its deployment isn't as straightforward or beginner- friendly as something like laravel. I love hearing how people are managing their side projects.

<comment><USER5> Deploying Django apps to Heroku is pretty straightforward. If you want to host yourself you can give a try to Dokku which similar but self-hosted. I have written a small tutorial on how to deploy Django apps with Dokku : [https://ponytech.net/blog/django-deployment- dokku](https://ponytech.net/blog/django-deployment-dokku)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well played, HN community! Not a single spam submission or otherwise abusive behaviour!

I opened the registration to the public, no need to request an invite!

<comment><USER5> I just registered and got an error 500 when veryfing my email

<comment><AUTHOR> Will investigate, thanks for letting me know!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is amazing. It would be great to have a README section. I am bookmarking this as my template/boilerplate for starting up new Django projects :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I plan to make a make-of tutorial out of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> QQ: Why is it invite only ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to be cautious in the beginning - I did not know what to expect.

I opened it now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for sharing, learned a thing or two!

A quick suggestion: add an index to the `Vote` model for the `user` and `item` fields.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Show HN: Meta: Show PN: Meta: Show HN: A news aggregator for the Python community written in Python/Django

[https://news.python.sc/item/20d9cda4-4337-4c66-a924-d4391f8a...](https://news.python.sc/item/20d9cda4-4337-4c66-a924-d4391f8a3886)

;-)

</comment><comment><USER9> Is the only reason we're ok with this blatant design ripoff because OP is "one of us"? It's basically a clone with only the colour changed.

<comment><USER10> HN's design was always just its own blatant ripoff of reddit anyway.

Here's what reddit looked like in February 2007 when HN launched: [https://web.archive.org/web/20070202004002/http://reddit.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070202004002/http://reddit.com/)

<comment><USER11> Wrong. See dang's comment below. Reddit was heavily inspired by del.icio.us/popular (which I built back in 2004 or so)

There's really not a lot of ways to design a list of links, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> do one for neural networks with keras + pytorch + papers and i will pay for it

<comment><AUTHOR> What exactly do you have in mind?

<comment><USER12> The space is evolving a lot. Just want a way to stay on top of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Drop me a line on twitter @sebastiansteins

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Please, let enable a RSS or Atom feed!

<comment><AUTHOR> In the pipeline!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You should call it PyNews :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Thanks for making this available but if you really want it to get it adopted you really should change from GNU license to much more permissive MIT license.

<comment><USER16> And you should not tell people what they should do with their work and IP. If they chose GNU, they chose GNU, and they have their reasons, deal with it.</comment></comment>


Humans vs. robots: the battle for the workplace - <AUTHOR> http://www.information-age.com/it-management/skills-training-and-leadership/123459609/humans-vs-robots-battle-workplace

<comment><USER2> As a developer, my job is going to pretty safe for a while; however, I think the big data revolution is real. If you want to continue making the big bucks as a developer, you'll have to learn to automate. A current example is the rise of DevOPs.

When we first started talking about Web 2.0, all the focus was on the interactivity that better browsers and stronger web standards enabled. In retrospect what makes Web 2.0 significant is what these better UXs enabled: big data collection on a scale never seen.

The snappy UIs enticed Sally Q to take up an interests in the Internet. The web was no longer the playground of boring people and nerds. Sally was now willing to become someone's autonomously updating data source. Web 2.0 was really about the creation of autonomous survey networks. The surface of Web 2.0 was UI/UX; on the underside of the iceberg, it was a revolution in data gathering.

The autonomous survey network's value is derived from the data it collects. This is why there are crazy billion $ valuations for what appear to be silly and/or banal web sites. It doesn't matter if the idea is silly; if it collects a lot of data the site has real intrinsic value - not as a website but as a honey pot.

Web 2.0 is over. New honey pots will spring up from time to time, but the (adult) public basically sees online communication as a commodity and therefore doesn't have much interest in the next new social network. Just like most people don't have much interest in the next ketchup innovation (although I must admit I am waiting on those nano-coated bottles that will let you get every drop out). Once it's a commodity, we pretty much stick with what we have.

Web 3.0 is all about consuming the bugs in the honey pot and making (commercially viable) sense out of their corpses. This is big data network engineering, AI, and machine learning. Most of the billion dollar software companies of the next 10 years will be companies that innovate in these spaces.

As companies begin to loose trust in the security of the cloud, they will begin hiring their own teams of statistician/programmer hybrids and big data network engineers.

TL;DR If you're a developer, start learning something related to big data.</comment>


OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Yeeloong 8101B - <AUTHOR> http://www.cambus.net/openbsd-loongson-on-the-lemote-yeeloong-8101b/ <comment><USER2> I dream of having a MIPS or PowerPC laptop. a shame the 3A variant went with a binary blob graphics processor (not that there are many alternatives) and that the 3B processor isn't available as a laptop as of now.</comment>


Skype Developer Platform - <AUTHOR> https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt124990.aspx

<comment><USER2> Looks like the existing APIs, like for Lync (terrible rename to "Skype for Business" that they secretly shoved out in Windows Update this month - confusing and pointless).

IIRC, NetMeeting also had some cool APIs, allowing you to easily get access to data channels and so on.

<comment><USER3> > terrible rename to "Skype for Business" that they secretly shoved out in > Windows Update this month - confusing and pointless

It's not pointless. Having one name for your business and consumer products makes things simpler.

<comment><USER4> Lync branding was confusing anyway.

<comment><USER5> Try working in a shop that does Linq. Link, Linq, and Lync sound exactly the same when spoken. So sentences like: "let me send you the linq link on lync" occur.

<comment><USER6> I frequently hear Linq pronounced "Link... Linqueue?", and Lync as "Link... Lüngg?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The web SDK "applies to: Skype for Business 2015" only. This is not an API for regular Skype accounts.

The Skype for Business allows external communication though, so... it will be possible to create integrations for regular users, right?

<comment><USER7> Ok, apparently "IM or audio conversations with three or more people" are "not available with Skype* users" according to [https://suppont.office.com/en- ca/article/Let-Skype-for-Busin...](https://suppont.office.com/en- ca/article/Let-Skype-for-Business-Online-users-communicate-with-external- Skype-for-Business-or-Skype-contacts-b414873a-0059-4cd5-aea1-e5d0857dbc94)

This makes it impossible then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks like it might greatly alter the landscape of lightly-integratable team communication tool space that Slack and HipChat are currently dominating.

Great move, Skype and Microsoft!

</comment><comment><USER9> Where are the payment hooks? Seems like that'd be useful.</comment>


Arcade Scam Science [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXBfwgwT1nQ <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DW: The 'Cyclone' arcade machine is a game with a ring of lights, one lit at a time. You have to push a button when the lit light is right in front of you. It looks like a game of skill, but actually it's a game of chance: the machine is programmed to give payouts with a certain probability, regardless of whether the button is actually hit at the right time. This is verified both using a cool Arduino gadget to repeatedly play the machine, and also via the machine's manual.</comment>


"Tomato" versus "#FF6347" – the tragicomic history of CSS color names - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/tomato-versus-ff6347-the-tragicomic-history-of-css-color-names <comment><USER3> Should be entitled "The tragic history of CSS episode n" where n is any number between 0 and infinity.

CSS is a complete utter crap that failed to solve the problems for which it exists. Today CSS is a broken tool that still can't easily be used to design even the most basic layout without requiring a ton of hacks.

Among a fews:

\- A broken box model that the W3C picked over the one from MS. For finally adding the MS's model years later leaving us with 2 boxe models and a broken compatibility.

\- Centering things? You have to use hacks even for this simple purpose.

\- Building grids? Let's have fun and pick the one you prefer : html tables, display table, floats, flexbox, css grids...

\- About Tables: 15 years ago everybody switche to tabless layouts for the purpose of separating markup from presentation. A few years later we got access to the table display mode in CSS because, well, not a single one from the other solution worked well to build layout. Qo we got offered the option to emulate html tables in CSS.

\- They added CSS animations. What animations have to do with styling and layout? Oh it's to compensate the bad performances we got when animating things with JS.

Etc, etc, etc. CSS is just a complete mess.

<comment><USER4> > CSS is a complete utter crap that failed to solve the problems for which it > exists.

Huh? Do you not remember/know what it was like to style webpages with FONT elements before CSS? CSS was a godsend. That was the separating content from presentation breakthrough.

The problem for which it existed wasn't layout. CSS1 (1996) didn't even have anything in it for layout.

>\- About Tables: 15 years ago everybody switche to tabless layouts for the purpose of separating markup from presentation.

Using tables for layout was the original hack. Likewise using floats to avoid it was also a hack. Neither of those features were designed for those purposes. You can possibly blame the CSS standard for being incomplete, but you can't blame it for designers creating elaborate hacks out of it.

> A few years later we got access to the table display mode in CSS because, > well, not a single one from the other solution worked well to build layout. > Qo we got offered the option to emulate html tables in CSS.

You make it sound like table display was added after the failure of other layout methods. Not so - table display was there right from the beginning when CSS first added layout (CSS2 in 1998). It was IEs failure to implement it for nearly a decade that meant nobody was aware of or could use it for many years.

<comment><USER5> > _Using tables for layout was the original hack._

A simple and practical hack that worked (and continues to work) identically across all browsers without the need for elaborate edge case code.

I'm curious, with the new libraries, can CSS yet do:

menu	leftcol	content

<comment><USER6> The display:table css properties are exactly equivalent to the display model of html tables. They were specified in CSS2 which became a recommendation in 1998, which is 17 years ago (!).

But due to the IE6 dominance and abandonment it took many years before this part of css was broadly supported by browsers, so developers had to either use html tables (even when not semantically appropriate) or use hacks like floats (which was not designed for this) to achieve a table-like layout. So the age of hack was due to browsers not supporting css, not to to deficiencies in css as such.

That said, html tables never displayed identically across browsers before css. There were lots of corner cases e.g. with the interaction of fixed and flexible columns. Which is not really surprising since the display model for tables were never specified in the first place before css.

<comment><USER5> _> display:table_

The delicious irony is that CSS had to emulate the old table model to overcome its default layout deficiencies. And IIRC it still can't natively handle mixing relative and fixed widths, and consistent vertical centering.

 _> html tables never displayed identically_

My bread and butter used to be slicing photoshop comps into websites. My table layouts were pixel perfect on every browser without hacks. I do agree there were a few things that had to be accomodated using   and spacer gifs - but it was painless compared to elaborate and fragile CSS hacks.

I shouldn't still care about this stuff - I moved to IOS dev thank goodness - but I still nuture a burning hatred of CSS years later :)

<comment><USER6> There is no irony. CSS replicate the table layout model in order allow you to separate markup from presentation but still be able to show tables. Otherwise, how should the default style sheet for table-elements look? CSS obviously needed to to have at least the same presentational power as presentational HTML to be backwards compatible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Perhaps the most vehement denunciation comes from a 2002 e-mail written by programmer Steven Pemberton: "The X11 colour names are an abomination that should have been stifled at birth, and adding them to CSS is a blemish on the otherwise excellent design of CSS.

Now I don't have much experience with CSS. Only have been using it for ~5 years, and never any of the real complex magic. But if I were to make a list of design problems I have with CSS, color names wouldn't even make it on the list.

<comment><USER8> The "otherwise excellent design of CSS"? That's something I've never heard anyone say...

The IE5.5 border-box box model issues happened because the CSS box model was so strange they assumed it was a mistake in the spec.

<comment><USER9> _Chuckles_

The other narrative I heard from some MS devs at the time was more like "we are reading the specs right, mozilla got it wrong".

I might still have the IRC logs to back this up.

<comment><USER10> Did MS even talk to the authors of the spec or Mozilla about it before shipping?

<comment><USER9> I don't remember when MS entered the W3C but that comment was around IE6 times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Funny - I had a conversation with a friend about this exact topic the other day.

Painting a few (old) walls in my apartment. I asked the original designer what color they were, and she confidently replied "Swiss Coffee". Great! So I got to Lowes only to find out....there are about 35 different variations on Swiss Coffee.

We seem to have solved the color issue when it comes to programming - <USER2> codes are (relatively) easy. Why are we still choosing our home paints based on horribly arbitrary names like "Shadow Mist" and "Lily Pond" ... ?

(And yes, I know the actual answer - branding! Why would you buy Brand A over Brand B if all the colors get commoditized into hex codes....the answer is...you wouldn't. So? Fancy names for everyone!)

<comment><USER12> It has been more or less solved - it's called the Pantone Color system. That said, it doesn't really work the way you'd expect. It'll get you close (say, if you need a consistent color for your brand), but a pantone color on it's own isn't enough to define a material.

The issue with defining physical colour codes is that it gets really complicated when you consider finish. With screen color, you have only one finish, and that's whatever the user's monitor happens to have. With paints and plastics the finish (how glossy the surface is, how metallic it is, coated or uncoated, inclusions like metal flake, etc) really messes things up. This tends to "break" systems like Pantone, and means that it's really hard to choose a few variables to absolutely define a color.

<comment><USER13> > With screen color, you have only one finish, and that's whatever the user's > monitor happens to have

Screens have a huge number of "finishes" because calibration varies wildly between devices. It's gotten better over the years but still few users have screens that accurately reproduce 100% of sRGB.

<comment><USER14> > _few users have screens that accurately reproduce 100% of sRGB._

All currently selling Apple computers (at least phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops, I'm not sure about the watches) are extremely close to sRGB. So that's a considerable proportion of computer/mobile device users.

Other vendors' devices have a much spottier record, but matching sRGB is by no means an impossible goal.

More generally, screens can be precisely characterized (either at the factory or by end users) and color management software can pipe pixel colors through a lookup table on their way to the display, so that at least in-gamut colors appear correctly.

Sadly Windows and Linux didn't support proper color management at an OS level for many years, so lots of software on those platforms still doesn't do it correctly. And web browsers on all platforms punt on correctly doing color management for CSS colors, with the excuse of matching non-color-managed Flash.

Even more unfortunately, neither iOS nor Android has any color management whatsoever. iOS gets around this by making sure all the displays have nearly identical color (at least on recent machines), but on Android getting accurate color is a crapshoot.

Then there are televisions, for most of which color is a complete joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Personally, the nice thing about a color name (maybe not _these_ color names) is that it tells you what it's supposed to look like. So if you want a tomato color, you can use "tomato", and not worry that your monitor is or isn't calibrated correctly.

If you're at all color blind, trying to design using color codes is probably an exercise in frustration.

Maybe what you need is a separate tool that tells you what that specific color code most looks like, sort of like xkcd's color survey:

[http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey- results/](http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/)

<comment><USER16> There's already a convenient list of colors built from this data: [http://xkcd.com/color/rgb.txt](http://xkcd.com/color/rgb.txt) (Visible graphically here: [http://xkcd.com/color/rgb/](http://xkcd.com/color/rgb/) )

Says the author: "I have no opinion about whether it should be used to build a new X11 rgb.txt except that seems like the transition would be a huge headache."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The CSS color names are incredibly stupid. The colors they call "red", "green", "blue", etc. are nowhere near the colors humans would consider closest to matching those labels, and combinations of basic CSS colors result in unusably ugly design.

More generally, color collections without any order or structure are terrible – that goes for Pantone, Crayola crayon colors, paint names at the hardware store, etc. These are great for vendor lock in, but useless for human understanding.

Instead colors should be specified in e.g. Munsell coordinates [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system) where the numbers are meaningful and intuitive.

And in the context of computers, the specification of color as RGB coordinates is fine for CPU-to-display communication, but ordinary people should never be forced to interact with it, as the dimensions of gamma-corrected RGB have very little relation to the structure of human color perception. Trivial shims over RGB such as HSL or HSV are not an acceptable alternative.

<comment> semi-extrinsic How is #FF0000 a poor choice for "red"? It's basically the definition.

Edit: and the color called "blue" in the image on top of the Munsell system wiki page is not blue, it's some shade of teal.

<comment><USER17> Well, #ff0000 is the definition of "red" within the RGB colorspace, corresponding to the full brightness of the "red" (only) pixel components, constrained by your monitor's limited reproduction gamut.

So yeah, it's "red". But it's not the color of anything that has ever been viewed by humans in real life (except itself). There are few pure colors in nature anyway, but you can talk about "red" being wavelength of the center of the "reddish" range of the visible light spectrum.

Of course, names for colors are always subjective. Crayola might be the best universal reference. Crayola red bears little resemblance to #ff0000, even discounting the pigment vs. light mixing and perception differences.

But you have to call it something, right? So #ff0000 is "pure red, RGB, luminous". :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We can all be thankful that at least CSS didn't adopt X11's approach to naming fonts. [1] [2]

[1] [http://www.sslug.dk/artikler/gnulinux/Bilder/xfontsel- twm.gi...](http://www.sslug.dk/artikler/gnulinux/Bilder/xfontsel-twm.gif)

[2] [http://www.klauser.com/lxug/ch13.pdf](http://www.klauser.com/lxug/ch13.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER19> It's interesting that the article kind of skipped straight from X11 colors to CSS. Presumably what happened was that JWZ, who was hacking together the Motif frontend for Mozilla (shortly before they renamed it to Netscape), added  and  to it, and just handed that string directly to XLookupColor, so that  would work? And then whoever was hacking together the Microsoft Windows and MacOS frontends had to copy rgb.txt and "#c0ffee" parsing into the Mozilla code in order to get cross-platform combatibility? I don't know, I wasn't there, but to me that's the actually interesting juncture. Up to that point, WWW colors could have been specified in any way whatsoever. After that, browsers had to be compatible with Mozilla (then Netscape, and then later IE) or people wouldn't use them.

</comment><comment><USER20> How many people use the names as opposed to hex values?

I'd rather just use the hex value and ensure it's rendered even if the browser hasn't implemented the latest version of the spec.

<comment><USER21> I use the hex-values/rgba because what does 'papaya whip' even mean? Plus not everyone on the internet are literate in English so RGBA or hex-RGB is far more internationalized.

<comment><USER22> > "I'm not a native English speaker. Imagine my reaction the first time I saw > the 'gainsboro' color or 'papaya whip,'" Daniel Glazman, co-chairman of the > CSS Working Group, told Ars.

Speaking as a native English speaker, I don't see how this could possibly be worse for non-native speakers. They have no idea, and neither do we.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A fun quirk of colour names in HTML: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8318911/why-does-html- thi...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8318911/why-does-html-think- chucknorris-is-a-color)

I don't think it applies to CSS, just 'bgcolor' and the like.

</comment><comment><USER24> > .. "dark gray" was lighter than "gray" ...

And still is!

vs

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh and before anyone comments on it, I should point out that "Peru" is a reference to a pottery color.

Some people assume it's racist.

</comment><comment><USER25> An utter aside but One colour does have a tragic history:-

#RebeccaPurple or #663399

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/06/digital- remem...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/06/digital-remembrance)

<comment><USER26> as mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ha, I posted this here the other day and it died on its arse. Random

<comment><USER28> We emailed you a repost invite but you never responded. Did it go into a spam bin? (Edit: We also emailed you one for [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10345055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10345055)).

I'll take this as a data point that the repost invite experiment is working, i.e. is helping to reduce the randomness of what gets noticed here.

<comment><USER29> Repost invites? What have I missed?

<comment><USER28> We've been running a series of experiments to find a solution to good stories failing to achieve liftoff from /newest.

The latest experiment involves emailing submitters when we notice a good story that got overlooked and inviting them to repost it. (On HN, a small number of reposts is ok when a story hasn't had significant attention yet; see the FAQ.)

Such reposts get an initial upvote from us. They also go into a pool from which the software periodically selects a story to place randomly near the bottom of the front page. Not all such stories get this treatment—it depends on factors like how old they are, how stale the front page is, and some randomness.

Placing a story near the bottom of the front page ensures that it gets a bit more attention from the community—surprisingly less than expected, but still a lot more than languishing on the 5th newest page. If there's interest, the story rises; if not, it falls off after a few minutes.

We use a combination of software filters and human review to find good-but- overlooked stories. "Good" here means by HN's definition of "gratifying intellectual curiosity".

The currently open questions are: (1) what to do when the submitter has no email address or doesn't check their email; (2) whether to add a profile setting people can turn on to have this happen automatically, and how exactly that would work; and most importantly (3) how to distribute the human review aspect to the community in a way that doesn't just reduce to the upvoting mechanism, which obviously does not suffice to surface the best stories.

Here are some links to look at if you want more about this:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20repost%20invite&sort...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20repost%20invite&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment) (<\-- mostly comments I posted because the submitter had no email address in their profile)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9828818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9828818)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9866140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9866140)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


London may have gone into a Covid-accelerated decline - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/05/21/london-may-have-gone-into-a-covid-accelerated-decline <comment><USER3> The article takes a long time to essentially get around to saying this:

> But covid-19 and the extreme social-distancing measures used to combat it > pose a new and more profound danger to the capital

I feel that during lockdown a fair few people have turned mildly insane - <USER2> seem to honestly believe that we're going to stand very far apart from other humans for the rest of time.

It's just not the case. I'll be in the pub by the end of the year.

<comment><USER4> Considering that the virus is here to stay for a few years at least, how can we blame them for thinking this way? Lifting the lockdown is not gonna make the virus disappear.

<comment><USER5> The virus is not gonna disappear but it doesn't mean you are going to be infected as well. If you do infected, doesn't mean you are going to have the symptom. If you do have the symptom, doesn't mean you are going to have severe symptom. If you do have severe symptom, doesn't mean you are going to require hospitalization.

<comment><USER4> Then why are we doing any lockdowns at all? If most of the young are near- safe, we should have just isolated the 60+ and kept society running as usual for the rest.

Clearly a lot of people are not willing to take the risk of contracting the virus.

<comment><USER6> That was the initial strategy of herd immunity, and everything we learned about this virus vindicated this strategy. But it didn't go well because the vulnerable population wasn't isolated. My opinion is that it is because instead of passing on the message of what to do to isolate the sick and the elderly, the media were busy trashing "evil Boris" and his herd immunity strategy.

And no the lockdown isn't about "lot of people are not willing to take the risk of contracting the virus", it is about keeping the pace of the tiny fraction of infections that go bad to under the capacity of the NHS / ICUs. At least that was the stated goal. It seems now that we have switched to a goal of zero infection (and not sure that it makes sense, given that I hear the WHO now refering to this virus as an "endemic disease").

<comment><USER7> My mum works in a care home, and the stories are harrowing. Anecdata leads me to believe they are the worst hit.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it is just anecdata. I think in NY care homes represent something like 40% of covid deaths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://archive.is/ZydIr](http://archive.is/ZydIr)

</comment><comment><USER8> >>> poor parts of the Midlands and north of England would get lots of infrastructure investment, helping them to close the productivity gap with London. The country would be "levelled up".

By "infrastructure" I guess they mean improvements to intercity rail connections, namely the high speed rail. I don't see those as localized improvements. Moreover they seem geared to decreasing commute times in/out of london (and a couple other of the largest cities). The net result is to allow rich londoners to live and commute from further afield. That isn't a move away from "peak capital", it's doubling down on that capital by further extending its influence, expanding the hinterlands on which it relies.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, no. High speed rail's main benefit is to increase capacity on existing lines by removing fast trains from the mix. Currently big gaps have to be left in front of the fast trains to allow them to run. The reduction in travel time is a secondary benefit.

I was unaware of this until I recently discovered Gareth Dennis on twitter, who is doing a fantastic job of making up for HS2 ltd's appallingly lacking public engagement "strategy".

<comment><USER10> Surely you mean removing slow trains from the mix?

<comment><USER9> Maybe "slow" is a misnomer or misleading. By slow we're talking about local services which stop at every station. When you relocate fast trains onto another line, those local services benefit considerably. Ultimately you get more local services running, which alleviates the sardine-style travel we currently endure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> London will be fine...

Source: The traffic jams outside my front door are back and the lockdown isn't even lifted yet.

<comment> globular-toast Nothing about that sounds "fine".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have no intention to go to the pub or travel abroad, especially with a potential two week quarantine. I have seriously ill early March and it wasn't fun at all. I am sure the pubs or the restaurants will not miss me

</comment><comment><USER13> "Why pay london rent when you can't enjoy what the city has to offer?" said my friend that lives there just the other day.

<comment><USER14> Yeah of course, but the same could he said for almost any major city in the world right now save a few exceptions in East Asia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> [https://archive.md/ZydIr](https://archive.md/ZydIr)

</comment><comment> ur-whale [http://archive.is/ZydIr](http://archive.is/ZydIr)

</comment><comment><USER16> Non-paywall link: [https://outline.com/4e95fm](https://outline.com/4e95fm)

</comment><comment><USER17> The article is behind a paywall and I can't read it, anyone got an alternative url?</comment>


Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, and the Gun (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://perival.com/delillo/ddbbc.html <comment><USER2> Recent and related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24423602](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24423602)

Also 2020 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22746175](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22746175)

2019 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817370](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817370)

2016 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11647600](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11647600)

</comment><comment><USER3> Just wanted to say that I love this website. It's a static site that's been maintained by one person for 20+ years. For me it's like a campfire, a great spot to come and find discussions, communion, and information in general on all thing DeLillo. So for anyone who likes this post I encourage you to check out the rest of the site: [http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html](http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html)</comment>


Linux 4.19-rc4 released, an apology, and a maintainership note - ah- http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1809.2/00117.html?print=anz <comment><AUTHOR> Dupe, with a lot of discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000698)</comment>